eDesign Dynamic’s Franco Montalto went on the hour-long environmental radio show “Planet Philadelphia” to discuss flooding and climate change, both locally and globally.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Broadly speaking, climate action is divided up into climate MITIGATION and climate ADAPTATION.
Climate MITIGATION is looking at efforts of addressing the root cause of climate change, and that is greenhouse gas emissions….So when you hear people within the world of climate action talking about mitigation work, it’s often efforts to reduce emissions, so that could be renewable sources of energy, it could be changes to a production cycle, it could be a variety of net zero approaches.
And then there’s the ADAPTATION world, which is about adapting to the climate change that is already baked in. We know that the climate has already changed and there will be more change, even if we were to mitigate completely our emissions right now (which of course we’re not doing). And so the process of adapting to this new normal of climate change is climate adaptation.
And then RESILIENCE is this other term sort of superimposed on top of all that. Given that climate change and other forces give us these acute stressors — you’ll have an extreme event like a Hurricane Ida, or an earthquake, or a storm surge — a resilient community is able to bounce back and continue to do the things it did before this stressor. A non-resilient community is one where that stressor sort of pushes the whole system into a different state, so maybe a whole bunch of things that were possible before are not possible afterward — this could have to do with the human condition, with the way infrastructure works, with transportation…”